SO, BTF. Revolutionary new design system? Or should it have been named PITA for experienced system builders? It’s a tricky one. On the one hand, at least from the front, this system looks remarkably clean. There are absolutely no cables on show at all, bar the two coming from the CPU block, and to be honest, you could eliminate those if you picked up a decent AIO with the cables running up the tubing, or something similar. We’ve seen a few of those land out there in the ether already.
It also feels a little odd that Asus chose to include a single fan header at the top of the board. We get it, it’s there for short CPU pump cables and such, but you could easily get around that by including a fan cable extender in the motherboard box, and make it even tidier.
The bigger problem by far, though, is the cable management in the rear, or at least how difficult it’s now become to manage that. Let’s be clear, this is a big issue that’s very much dependent on the rest of the ecosystem, and that gives us a touch of worry.